"It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled."

"It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘back up you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’"

So Hillary admits that she couldn't think of what to do under pressure. She needs a pause button. Is that like a reset button? There's no such thing. I mean you can vandalize the hotel hot tub to get a plastic button to call whatever you want — the Make Me President button — but it doesn't work.



More from the leaked excerpts to the memoir we're not all going to buy when it comes out in a few weeks:

"I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off."

The writer assumes the reader will not immediately think: Bill Clinton!

"I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard," she wrote. 

The writer assumes the reader will not think: phallic symbol.

“I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.”

If you present an endlessly smiling controlled face to the world and choose to say nothing, people won't know what you think, won't trust you, and — since you're asking to be our President — won't be able to rely on you to speak for us. If you're that afraid to come up with an apt response to someone who's being intimidating, how do you have what it takes to be President? You think if you said something, it might be bad, so best to say nothing?

Look how easy it was for George W. Bush to push back Al Gore's overbearing physical encroachment during a debate:



Perfect. That nod. Everyone laughed. Nobody thought Bush seemed unpresidentially peevish. I still laugh every time I play that clip. And I play it a lot.

UPDATE: I have more to say about "back up you creep" here.